Video: What can you shoot in low light?

Very often, you know what the subject you want to shoot is, but light levels in the scene are low enough that getting the shot can be difficult. For example, a holiday dinner with your family, you know you want to shoot your relatives and maybe the food, but the room is lit only by candles. With that low light level, it's going to be hard to freeze motion and get a sharp image. We will be looking at how to handle those situations later in this course. But low light isn't always a problem. If you know how to work with it, low light can open up new photographic possibilities.

Join photographer and teacher Ben Long as he describes the tools, creative options, and special considerations involved in shooting with a DSLR camera at night or in low-light conditions, such as sunset or candlelight. The course addresses exposure decisions such as choice of aperture and shutter speed and how they impact depth of field and the camera's ability to freeze motion.

Ben also shows how to obtain accurate color balance in tungsten and fluorescent lighting situations, and how to postprocess the images in Photoshop to remove noise caused by higher ISO settings. He also demonstrates accessories that can greatly expand your low-light photography options.

What can you shoot in low light?

Very often, you know what the subject you want to shoot is, but light levels inthe scene are low enough that getting the shot can be difficult.For example, a holiday dinner with your family, you know you want to shoot yourrelatives and maybe the food, but the room is lit only by candles.With that low light level, it's going to be hard to freeze motion and get a sharp image.We will be looking at how to handle those situations later in this course.But low light isn't always a problem.If you know how to work with it, low light can open up newphotographic possibilities.

Now it's a fairly obvious statement to say that the world looks very differentat night or in very low light.But let's think for a minute about why it looks different.First, with less light, some things are simply less visible.Now that can really change where your eye is drawn to in an image.In other words, in low light, the subject of a scene may shift dramaticallysimply because of what's visible.During the day we mostly live by sunlight. When the sun goes down other lightsources take over and those light sources are not always so high overhead.

This change in the direction of lighting can lead to very different textures in a scene.What's more, they can have a heavy influence on what the subject of the scene is, and veryoften this different type of lighting can be an interesting subject in itself.Finally, the type of lighting you get in low-light situations or at nighttimecan simply create plays of light and shadow that do not exist in the daytime:reflections, highlights, interesting shadows, splashes of light. There can beall sorts of light features that don't appear in the same scene under brighter light.

So honing your low-light skills offers not just the ability to capture imagesthat can be difficult;as you learn to shoot in low light, you should find yourself discoveringshooting opportunities that you simply had not seen before, possibly in locationsthat you are already familiar with.Learning to shoot in low light is as much about learning to see differentlyand recognize a different type of subject matter as it is learning anyparticular technical process.And that makes the study of low-light shooting a worthwhile pursuit, no matterhow much you ultimately end up doing it.

Because the more you can learn about seeing, the better all of yourphotography will be.

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